wowwikifandomcom-20200223-history
Profession
A profession is a craft or tradeskill that player characters may learn regardless of their character class, faction, or race. The first recipes you get are useful for gearing up low level characters (assuming a higher level character is not helping to support you). Some contend that as soon as you start running instances, the drops will usually be better than most crafted items from the same level, but this is not always the case. Quite often crafted items will provide comparable stats or utility benefits that are quite useful for characters of all levels. The most benefit to your character comes from trying to keep your professions leveled up as you progress through the game. High end crafting, including specializations, can be extremely useful and lucrative, especially from patterns that come from end game faction grinding or drop in high level instances (some of which Bind on Pickup. There are also several quests which require crafted items for completion. Professions and secondary skills Professions and secondary skills are different classes of skills. You can have up to 2 professions at any time, but are not required to take any. You can have any of the secondary skills, however. Professions Professions fall into one of three categories: "Crafting" Users of these professions mostly make items from other ingredient items (herbs, bars, meats, etc.) taken from the gathering professions or created by building professions. Blizzard calls these "Production professions". Most folks in game call them crafting or building. "Gathering" professions mostly gather or harvest items from resources throughout the game world to increase their proficiency. "Service" Really the "other" category, but generally covers professions that primarily provide a service over producing equipable items or consumable buffing items. Crafting Alchemy - Mix potions, elixirs, flasks, oils and other alchemical substances (usually liquid) using herbs and other reagents. Most recipes require various types of vials. High level alchemists can also transmute essences and metals into other essences and metals. Alchemists can specialize as a Master of Potions, Master of Elixirs, or a Master of Transmutation. Blacksmithing - Smith metal weapons as well as mail and plate armor keys and other useful trade goods. Blacksmiths can also make items from stone to temporarily buff weapons. Blacksmiths can specialize as armorsmiths or weaponsmiths, with further specialization available for weaponsmiths as a swordsmith, axesmith, or a hammersmith. Engineering - Engineer mechanical devices, explosives, and trinkets, such as grenades, explosive sheep, mechanical pets. Usually these are crafted with metal, minerals, and stone. Engineers can specialize as Goblin or Gnomish engineers. Leatherworking - Work leathers and hides using such items as thread into goods such as leather armor and armor kits. Leatherworkers can also make very low level cloth capes and, after level 40, sets of mail armor. They can specialize into Dragonscale, Elemental, or Tribal Leatherworking. Tailoring - Sew all sorts of cloth goods, including cloth armor and bags. Also weave raw cloth items such as linen cloth into bolts of that type of cloth. Usually requires various types of thread to make finished items. Tailors can specialize into Primal Mooncloth, Shadowcloth, or Spellcloth. Jewelcrafting - Craft rings, necklaces, BoP trinkets, jeweled headpieces, and gems to be placed in special armor or weapons. The extra ability of Prospecting comes with this craft, which allows you to prospect rare minerals from raw ore that has been mined but not smelted. Gathering Herbalism - Harvest herbs from the ground and some dead mobs. Mining - Mine ore, minerals, various gems and stone from protruding veins or deposits. Use a Forge to smelt the ore you find into bars of metal. Requires a Mining Pick. Skinning - Skin skinnable corpses for hides, leather, and scales. Requires a Skinning Knife. Services Enchanting - Extract magical dusts, essences and shards for use to enchant various attributes, powers, and properties to all sorts of equipable items. Enchanters can also make wands and oils that can be applied to weapons providing a temporary buff. Inscription - (not yet released) Create inscriptions that modify existing spells and abilities. Secondary skills Cooking - Cook food that can also provide temporary buffs. First Aid - Create bandages and poison-cleansing anti-venoms. Fishing: Gathering - Fish from lakes, rivers and oceans using a Fishing Pole. Riding - Required to ride a mount. Increasing skill As you increase in a skill, more recipes reach a 0% chance to increase the skill (at this point the recipe will appear grey in the profession window). When a recipe turns green, a skill raise seldom occurs. A yellow recipe will raise the skill by roughly 50% of the number of iterations. An orange recipe always raises the skill 1 point (the exception to this rule being Skinning, wherein skinning a corpse which appears orange does not guarantee a skill increase, and often many such corpses must be skinned in order to raise the skill). The chance of skilling up changes within a color band as well. For example, if a particular item goes from orange to yellow at 240 and from yellow to green at 255, the chance of skilling up will be almost as good as orange from 240-245, middling from 245-250, and barely better than green from 250-255. It is often beneficial to make high yellow items to skill up more cost effectively than orange items, but low yellow items should only be used if inexpensive (or if profitable!). Bonus to skill You can also increase your skill level with certain racial abilities, items, and enchants. Principally the chance to skill up is based off of the characters base skill level - i.e. the skill level before the racial or item bonus. This makes it much easier to level up the skill. The Draenei Jewelcrafting skill bonus of 5, for example, means that a recipe that turned from orange to yellow at 30 for other races would not turn yellow until 35 for a Draenei jewelcrafter. Racial profession Certain races receive a profession skill bonus as a racial trait. * Gnome → +15 Engineering * Tauren → +15 Herbalism * Draenei → +5 Jewelcrafting * Blood Elf → +10 Enchanting Enchants Certain enchants give profession skill bonuses. * Enchant Gloves - Fishing adds 2 to Fishing skill. * Enchant Gloves - Herbalism adds 2 to Herbalism skill. * Enchant Gloves - Mining adds 2 to Mining skill. * Enchant Gloves - Skinning adds 5 to Skinning skill. * Enchant Gloves - Advanced Mining adds 5 to Mining skill. * Enchant Gloves - Advanced Herbalism adds 5 to Herbalism skill. Equipment Certain items give profession skill bonuses. * adds +10 to Skinning skill. * adds +10 to Skinning skill. * adds +5 to Mining skill. * adds +5 to Herbalism skill. * See Boosting Your Fishing Skill for a table of the many items that add to Fishing skill. These items can allow you to skin creatures with levels greater than 70, or catch fish in areas that require greater than 375 Fishing skill. Proficiency levels Professions can be trained to 5 levels of proficiency. Some of the skills, especially gathering and secondary skills, do not have character level requirements for some levels. All require level 5 to get apprentice. All the primary, crafting skills have the level requirements. All the secondary skills have a quest which is given only at or above the level requirement for Artisan. (A quick rule of thumb to calculate the max skill points is: floor(level/10)*75 + 75, which is accurate for all titles except Master, which normally would be level 45 instead of level 50.) Reputation All of the skills have reduced cost to train depending on your reputation with the Faction to which the trainer belongs. Since you can generally have at least one reputation at Honored by 20th level, selecting where to train will save you (5% as compared to the cost when Friendly). This is also true for all recipes for the building professions. Trainers * The Trainer page has links to a comprehensive list of trainers for each profession/skill. * The Profession trainers by skill page is currently incomplete and out of date. Factions Many good high-level recipes are sold by factions. Faction grinding keeps many crafters busy for several weeks and can often be very expensive if you are not backed by a guild. It is not uncommon for a crafter to start out with two collecting professions (usually Skinning/Mining or Skinning/Herbalism), later learn the first production craft, and in the end learn a second production craft to maximize benefit from the faction. Unlearning a profession You may unlearn a profession and start a new one but this removes the chosen profession. If you were to learn it again, you would have to start leveling it from a skill level of 1 again. You will also forget any recipes you may have acquired in your old profession so they must be reacquired if you take it up again. The new profession you choose to replace it with also starts with a skill level of 1. You can unlearn a profession from your skills tab (the hotkey is k). To do so, click on the appropriate profession, and in the bottom part of the panel is a tiny icon that when moused over will tell you it lets you unlearn your profession. Be sure you really want to unlearn a profession; Blizzard will not undo it if you change your mind! See also *Farming is a term used to describe the act of gathering reagents/materials to make Profession items - usually referring to hard-to-find ingredients. See the Places to Farm article for more details. *Factions Page *1-300 Profession Guides * Professions/Beginner's Guide External links Category:Game Terms Category:Characters Profession